Morris: Auburn pitcher is lucky after scary hit

THE 2,500 OR SO FANS WHO stuck around for the conclusion of South Carolina’s baseball victory against Auburn at Carolina Stadium on Friday evening, witnessed the closest thing they will see to a miracle.

With two outs in the home half of the eighth inning, DeAngelo Mack stepped to the plate against Auburn pitcher Chris O’Neil. Mack was the fifth batter to face the right-hander, who was still feeling his way around the mound with 11 games of college experience.

O’Neil’s first pitch to Mack was a mid-80s mph fastball that reversed direction off Mack’s bat, and perhaps exceeded 100 mph as it rocketed at O’Neil’s head. Slow-motion replays show that O’Neil’s reaction time was exceptionally fast. In fact, his glove crossed the front of his face a millisecond before the ball smacked him square in the forehead.

The ball ricocheted like a popup, flying some 75 feet in the air and landing softly in the grass, 30 feet off the infield dirt in shallow right field. The nearly simultaneous ping!-whoop! sound of the ball first hitting the bat, then O’Neil’s head was followed by a chilling silence throughout the stadium.

Coincidentally, this week’s issue of Sports Illustrated features a lengthy story about ballpark safety. The excerpt from the book “Heart of the Game: Life, Death, and Mercy in Minor League America” details deaths and near-death incidents on baseball diamonds.

According to the book, no professional player has ever been killed by a batted ball in the United States. There have been 76 such deaths in amateur games. The story ran on the heels of an April 9 game in which San Francisco Giants pitcher Joe Martinez took a line drive to the head and experienced three hairline fractures in his skull.

As USC’s Bobby Haney rounded third base, he stopped for a second, unsure whether he should continue home or attend to O’Neil, who lay face down on the pitcher’s mound. After pausing, Haney easily scored USC’s eighth run of the game.

Part of the reason Haney paused was the sight of Auburn’s second-year trainer Jon Michelini, who sprinted out of the visitor’s dugout and nearly ran into Haney. Upon realizing that play had not been stopped, Michelini also froze.

“I was expecting to see something pretty bad out there when it happened,” Michelini says.

A few steps onto the field was Auburn coach John Pawlowski, a former Clemson pitcher who reached the major leagues with the Chicago White Sox. As a junior at Clemson, Pawlowski was hit by a line drive that broke his right pitching forearm.

“When I went out there, I was expecting to see something I didn’t want to see,” Pawlowski says.

By Sunday, less than 48 hours after the incident, O’Neil said he was eager to pitch again. Auburn’s medical staff did not allow him to pitch either Saturday or Sunday in Columbia and wanted to examine him further before clearing him to play.

“I’m sure that will run through my head,” O’Neil says of the fear of pitching again, “but I just want to get back on the horse as quickly as I can. I don’t want to wait around and think about it too much, because that’s when I think it can psych you out. It happened once, but the odds of it happening again are really so slim to none.”

College baseball is taking steps to prevent such instances. It continues to reduce the velocity of what it calls “exit speed,” or the speed the ball travels off the bat. Two years from now, college bat regulations will be enforced that will move aluminum bats closer to having the same exit speed as wood bats.

Will the change prevent such violent collisions of ball and head like the one experienced by O’Neil on Friday? Not likely. Even if the changes reduce the chance of serious injury, there remains an enormous amount of luck involved.

“He was very, very fortunate,” Pawlowski says of O’Neil. “I don’t know. I don’t know how he managed to get away unscathed in that situation. It was certainly scary.”

Within seconds of being hit by the ball, O’Neil jumped to his feet. He was light-headed but otherwise showed no signs of any ill effects. There was no bleeding. He was removed from the game, and trainers placed an ice pack on his forehead.

Two Auburn trainers slept in the same hotel room with O’Neil Friday evening, awakening the pitcher every two hours to check his vital signs. He did not have so much as a headache. By Sunday, there was a barely visible scratch mark on his forehead. He did not have a concussion, although his jaw was sore.

O’Neil says he has said many prayers of thanks over the past few days. He believes he was part of a “miracle,” and anyone who was there to see it would agree.

Listen to Morris Tuesdays from 4-5 p.m. on ESPN Radio 93.1 FM.